Have you ever dreamt of OpenOffice.org integration in KDE? Perhaps you should try cuckooo, a KDE Part which allows OpenOffice.org to be run in a Konqueror window. It is currently limited to just viewer capabilities, but as you can see from the screenshots, the technology is promising. You can of course download and try it, but please be patient with it. Cuckooo is at a very early stage of development, so you might encounter debug info on the standard error output, misbehavior or even crashes. But if you are willing to test it, I am looking forward to feedback!

Comments

I find it exceedingly interesting that you managed to accomplish this before the Bonobo guys, especially when Ximian has been throwing money at it. Says a lot about the power of KDE component technology and perhaps your own hacker skills.

Good stuff, congratulations for the integration (which is never easy since it requires to understand two different worlds :).

I hope that this doesn't create too much of a nightmare for packagers though - this stuff depends on both kdelibs-devel and the OOo source code (or devel packages?), to be compiled. No problem for users, of course.

One thing I love about this idea is the possibilities it could throw open with tools like DCOP, KJSEmbed and even Kommander. Just imagine, you throw together a psuedo-application using a point-and-click GUI that will, with a keystroke or mouse click, go through lots of documents and perform complicated tasks like formatting, spellchecking, etc, putting OO together with other KDE apps. No need to sit and learn to script (DCOP, Applescript), nor to put up with simple macros that only work within the given application (any office app).

Of course there's nothing (except time & code!) stopping this from happening with KOffice, but for the moment OO has the lead on support for things like MS Word, and it's more likely to be adopted by businesses.

It might also be cool to experiment with KJSEmbed, splitting OO up into many modular components and making it easy for people to make their own office suite, piecing together the parts they need. I, for example, only seem to use the basic text formatting tools, bullet/number points, footnotes and occasionally embedded charts and graphs. It'd be fun and probably useful to be able to make my "own" kword/kspread app that had a GUI I custom made for my needs.

> I, for example, only seem to use the basic text formatting tools,
> bullet/number points, footnotes and occasionally embedded charts and
> graphs. It'd be fun and probably useful to be able to make my "own"
> kword/kspread app that had a GUI I custom made for my needs.

That's actually very easy - you just need to create your own menu and toolbar XML file. That's it.

Last time I checked the OOo guys were planning on an abstract API to allow bindings to other toolkits like GTK and Qt. I also wonder how eventloop merging is supposed to work in this case. Anyone with details?

This is very good. Then you can easy switch the widget library kde, qt, gtk, wxwindows etc, etc.
If kde chooses this solution to be the "official office" of kde then kde will be more independent from QT/GPL.

On the other hand, I get a feeling that a *tool*kit shouldn't be something you have to support - it should be something you _use_ to get your work done. The toolkit isn't meant to be "abstracted away", it's meant to be taken full advantage of. Then again, separating UI code from the rest as far as possible is probably a good thing.

agreed. when comparing based on common functionality, i find KOffice is much nicer to work with. KOffice just isn't feature complete yet, and has some nagging performance issues. it's coming along nicely, though.

that said, having something that allows OOo to be integrated better into KDE is great. even if KOffice and OOo were feature equals, it would still be great simply because OOo has a huge user base. the importance of having as many applications work well with KDE can not be understated.

If you have an already running instance of OOo (e.g. cuckooo is already displaying a file in another window), it is just the same time it takes to OOo itself to load the file. If no, cuckooo must start OOo, and it takes some time. But it is done paralelly with downloading the file, so if your network is slow enough, you won't even notice it:)

Checkout the "pagein" binary. It uses the madvide interfaces so that linux
loads the libs into memory. It seems that this improves the loading of OOo quite a bit ( I've heard of 10-30 % improvement ).
I wonder would ie also help with some of the KDE libs ?

It was the one I dreamt and would like to contribute.
Seems that someone (you) who has time read the post (thanks for the referrence).

With your touch, now koffice is mature office suite! You are saving millions of years to kword, kspread, kpresenter, etc team, now they can just drop this parts and use the real ones that come from Sun team.

After some porting to kde/qt widgets this will really look like regiar kde office. This will be nice because then it will adapt to my current theme instead of using some old gray style. Replacing old koffice components with OO components will make koffice the best office suite for my KDE, until now it was OO from Sun. OO is good, not good as msoffice but enough good to use it because of it's crossplatform portability.

in my opinon (since this is a place to voice it). I think OO sucks, sucks a lot. I really wonder how many people use OO on a regular basis. This last spring semester, I thought I would try to use it for all my lab reports and papers I needed to write for univ. I turned from thinking OO could replace MS Office, to spending a lot more time in the Win2K lab in the EE building. Basically, I find OO terrible.

My number one compaint with it is its speed, which also contains an amusing anecdote. In Linux, OO writer takes like about 13-20sec (avg of about 16) -- and yes I ran it 10 times in a row and then ran it another 10 times with it being the only other thing open besides running KDE HEAD. It didn't really make too much of a difference when I had like 3 Konquerors, KMail, KJots, Kate, and 2 Konsoles -- about an additional second. Now the amusing part. In Windows XP, it takes no more than 8seconds to open and usally about 5seconds. I ran it 10 times in row in XP and got almost the same exact startup speed. My computer isn't too slow either. I have a XP 2500+ (Barton) with 256KB of PC2700 and a Seagate 60GB HD running in UDMA4 (I think). At any rate hdparm -tT reports about 50MB/s transfer speed and I'm running resier so I guess what like 15-20MB/s of actual bandwidth.

2) It is a general hacky feeling to the UI and GUI. I think it suffers from your standard OSS/FS application problem. Usability. More than once, I've tried to do something and could not figure out how to do it. Going to the OO irc channel is worthless. I've tried 3 times for help them and got nothing. After the 2nd time I wasn't going to go back, but I did and of cource got not help. Every time I was there, either got no answer or believe it or not "I'm just a developer I've never really used it too much. Try like #linpeople or something, or use the email lists." Then the GUI problem, is I think its kind of ugly, and what's with the mouse cursor. It reminds me of using the old Sun machines at school. I will say one thing, it has been getting more responsive with most every release though. Still its a bit "draggy" at some times.

3) Stability. This is the main reason I had to stop using OO and go to MS Office. EVERY time I would write a lab report (those who are in univ know they're common especially for EE classes more than CS) I needed to add at least 1 graph. Well guess what would happen, it would crash trying to paste the graph into OO Writer from the speadsheet. Or trying to move the graph around would crash it.

4) One last thing that needs working on with OO is this and it makes me so fucking mad I could scream. Why the HELL is there no up-one-line "action". There is down-one-line, but not up. Why? There is even "return to the beginning of the page or sentence or whatever" but not up one line. The only reason I can think of is that most OO developers are, basically, mad. Completely mad. And maybe it is just the Windows version that does not have an "up one line" action.

At any rate, a good office suite is what the OSS/FS community lacks. It is really what most people use so much. Hopefully this next KOffice suite can at least equal OO if not surpase it. With KDE's integration (kparts) and its decent usability and look, KOffice could be one application that could switch office workers over to Linux and Unixware (j/k).

I disagree. OO is the best free office, and the only who beats it is of course MS but it's commercial - normally to be better.

Did you report a bug about OO? I see you are unhappy with some things but you could tell them and they fix.

Here are the advantages of OO:
1) Runs on all popular platforms (the only one)
2) Supports the world standart document exchange formats (doc, xls, ppt), only does not support pdf
3) Connects to multiple databases
4) It's stable

The main reason for my choice is 1) because once you learn and start feeling comfortable with a given app crossing between platforms (while using same apps) will be no problem. Netscape is the other solution that gives you the same advantage.
Of course if MS ports their office to linux they will have the same advantage too.

It will be a long step forward for the KDE office if it replaces it's own word, excel and powerpoint components with the ones ported from OO to KDE. And the only reason for that will be that look&feel will be consistent accross the apps in the environment (the native OO looks like old win app).

One problem I had btw with the OO - it does not print correctly but it does not bothers me a lot because paperwork is for the previous century, we are now living in the digital century.

PS: Someone should fix this forum, it's not likely to use <BR> for line termination

>>Here are the advantages of OO: 1) Runs on all popular platforms (the only one)
Well the Mackie version is in the making. Still no MacOS <10 but that will be gone anyway. (though Macs tend to live longer than PCs)

2) Supports the world standart document exchange formats (doc, xls, ppt), only does not support pdf
It does! OOo1.1 writes pdf as well as Flash .swf for presentations. It still doesn't open pdf which is a pity. (Koffice does but can't export it to something es

3) Connects to multiple databases
Depends what you're meaning to do. OOo/SO does connect to MySQL, dBASE and Adabas natively and via ODBC to all known databases. What it lacks is the ability to retrieve data from various sources (e.g. one customer table from MySQL and the transaction table from an Oracle db on an ODBC connection) and join them. That's a pity. The competing Office suite does. That's why so many folks still use Access to retrieve, join, calculate and report data though they know that MSoff sucks, spys and opens back doors as big as a railroad tunnel.

4) It's stable
That's for sure. Stability has improved tremendously. Data loss doesn't occur - it has never happened to me at least.

I have to agree with this. I much prefer koffice to openoffice. Koffice starts a lot faster and overall it is more stable. I can't comment on how well it works with ms document formats but that is not an issue that I have but it does import pdfs nicely and creates them just fine also. Overall I don't use an office suit very much but when I do I use koffice. It does what I need and it works with the rest of my system. IO slaves I consider to be a critical feature and apps that don't have an equiv I don't want to use.

And as a lot of other users, I am awaiting for a GCC + libs that won't break ever again between different compiler versions and being faster than ever when programming stuff using the C++ programming language.

Unfortunately it seems those GCC guys hate C++ :|
(bad decision, if they won't fix this very big issue between now and one year I'm going back to Windows + MSVC, which does allow one to just build a library and use it with any program, compiled with any compiler - and having better speed as well)

So what's the big deal then. Your system is likely compiled with one compiler and you don't upgrade your system. Why not use that compiler?

Maybe because it's not good enough yet? I believe the C++ language support of gcc is on a parser level among the best so far. Only the resulting binaries are lacking big ways in terms of quick loading. Too many relocations for virtual tables is the problem there.

But I believe that problem is one of the loader, binutils, not one the compiler can deal with. What can gcc do to change the way C++ works or the way ELF (the binary format) is or how it is loaded by the OS? Nothing.

The gcc guys are doing great work. Your anti-GCC guys sentiment must be remaining from the days when people felt it was necessary to create egcs fork which in the end is as of 2.95 the new official gcc.

My only complaint with gcc is the performance of compilation. But correctness comes first. Still NO compiler does parse standard C++. Not even the MSVC you mentioned. None.

gcc is striving to be the first one. Just look at the comments of rewriting the C++ parser to be 2 pass and it no longer accepting incorrect KDE C++. It proves that they make a lot progress still on C++ field.

So what's the big deal then. Your system is likely compiled with one compiler and you don't upgrade your system. Why not use that compiler?

Maybe because it's not good enough yet? I believe the C++ language support of gcc is on a parser level among the best so far. Only the resulting binaries are lacking big ways in terms of quick loading. Too many relocations for virtual tables is the problem there.

But I believe that problem is one of the loader, binutils, not one the compiler can deal with. What can gcc do to change the way C++ works or the way ELF (the binary format) is or how it is loaded by the OS? Nothing.

The gcc guys are doing great work. Your anti-GCC guys sentiment must be remaining from the days when people felt it was necessary to create egcs fork which in the end is as of 2.95 the new official gcc.

My only complaint with gcc is the performance of compilation. But correctness comes first. Still NO compiler does parse standard C++. Not even the MSVC you mentioned. None.

gcc is striving to be the first one. Just look at the comments of rewriting the C++ parser to be 2 pass and it no longer accepting incorrect KDE C++. It proves that they make a lot progress still on C++ field.

OO1.1 is a vast improvement in speed over the old versions, and does a great job at importing MS stuff. I have on a linux machine at work, but due to my project management role, have to deal with stuff in MS formats where a complaint asking people why they don't use open formats will be met with a stern wall of bureaucratic resistance, so getting MS formats to import is a vital importance.

I used to use VMWare + MS Office, but with OO 1.1 I am now capable of dumping MS altogether. In 99% of the cases it imports perfectly, with the following 1% needing just minor tweaks by me (margins and stuff, but then again that used to happen to me using MS Office as well).

I dream of the day that KOffice can do the same, but it's just not there yet. For the time being projects like this to integrate the "working-now" OO are important to get people productive and working.